Some dialogs (like the AutoCAD INSERT command) can show a tiny preview image. These are not always created or updated by the CAD engine. To create/update these, you need to manually use the BLOCKICON command. Following the command is a prompt allowing matching names. If you have a large collection you may want to use this, otherwise simply take the default <*>.

Be very careful when using the ALIGN command if your destination points contain varying elevations (Z values). The ALIGN command is a 3D command! If your destination points vary only slightly you won’t see the distortion but when you list your results, it will have a “Extrusion direction relative to UCS:”

You can work around the problem with point filters. When prompted for destination points, enter .XY, then use your object snap, then CAD will prompt for a Z, enter 0.0. This way you will get the alignment without the extrusion problem.

AutoCAD 2017 introduced a change to the way it handles the background in icons for ribbons, menus, etc. For many years the longstanding tradition was to allow RGB 192,192,192 to represent transparency in icons. Now old custom CUIX files display with an undesirable light gray background.

Sometimes users want to capture AutoCAD command line output for parsing into a report. The quick easy way if you don’t have too much content is right clicking the command line area, choosing Copy History and pasting that into an editor to remove the unnecessary parts. However sometimes your content exceeds the history buffer or you just want more control.

AutoCAD LOG controls allow you capture what you want, here are the details.

You may have wished to fill your parcels to highlight the areas but found there isn’t a way to designate the fill transparency. The resulting fill blots out everything (even some parcel lines). Here is a workaround (using layers) to achieve it.

We have reached a fork in the road on our Civil/Survey and Mapping add-ons. For years we attempted to provide one package that ran inside plain CAD engines as well as Civil3D while using the best objects available. The problem is that it meant a weaker (than possible) Civil3D connection, prevented us from adding tools only (currently) possible in Civil3D and created confusion on what parts used Civil3D objects.

Keep in mind that TXT/ASC files can contain anything (even the paragraphs of this post content) so we process it differently. We have a Point > File > Convert Text which handles any text file, regardless of the delimiter. It lets you preview the content, specify the delimiter and column order then parse the results into a defined point format.

If your ascii files are P,N,E,Z,D you can simply change the extension to .AUF and the program would read the files directly.